City of Glory (9 page)

Manon came in through the kitchen door, avoiding the shop where Maurice Vionne traded in jewels when he could get them, and more regularly engaged in the smithing of gold and silver. Her father was waiting for her. “You’re soaked, Manon. Where have you been?”

“To the Fly Market, Papa. I told you I was going. There was a dreadful storm, did you not hear it?”

She set down her basket as she spoke, and took off her high-crowned straw bonnet and her embroidered shawl, revealing a white and-lavender-checked day dress with a high frilled neck and long sleeves with ruffled cuffs. Modest enough, but wet as it now was, the thin cotton fabric clung to her body. That didn’t alarm Vionne as much as the flush in her cheeks. Lately, he was more and more convinced his daughter was keeping secrets, and less and less sure what to do about it. Her mother had died eight years before. Vionne was convinced that if his wife had lived their Manon would be married by now, and he would be dandling a grandchild or two. Perhaps a grandson to replace the three sons who had not lived to work beside him as he’d once dreamed, a male heir to learn smithing and inherit his business. “I heard today that Pierre DeFane has a nephew coming from Virginia,” he said. “Seems his wife died last year and he—”

“I will be happy to meet the gentleman when he arrives, Papa. I am always happy to entertain your friends, you know that. Now, look at the lovely fish I found at the market.” Manon folded back the cloth that covered the contents of her basket and held it up for his inspection. “You shall have a delicious
soupe de poisson
for your dinner.”

It was always the same: She never opposed him outright. If she did, he could command her obedience. Instead she was compliant and sunny and seemed to fall in with whatever he wanted. But nothing ever went his way, always hers. You are too clever for me, my Manon. Too clever for any man. And that is the problem.
“Soupe de poisson,”
he said. “I will enjoy that.”

Maurice Vionne was perhaps the best known of the town’s Huguenot jewelers. He could afford a cook, but like her mother before her, Manon did all the shopping and cooking for the household. It was a considerable savings in the monthly expenses, so perhaps it wasn’t so bad that she was a spinster. Besides, she was useful in the shop. In a country without a royal court to support trade in precious stones, smithing was the everyday work that bought their dinners. All the same, trading in priceless stones, that was in the Vionne blood, and Manon had an eye for a jewel as keen as his own. “I will want you to mind the premises later this evening,” he said.

“Of course, Papa. Will you not be here?”

“I will be upstairs. With a visitor.”

Manon’s heart began to pound. She made a huge effort not to let her excitement show. “A customer, Papa? Someone you won’t see in the shop?”

Vionne shrugged. “Someone whose business is private. Jewels are often held close to the heart,
ma petite.
You have surely learned that by now.”

“Indeed, Papa.” Manon knew that more than one widow had come to Maurice Vionne long after business hours, white-faced and mortified that she needed to sell her jewelry to get money to live. “Am I to take it you will be receiving a lady?”

Vionne started from the kitchen and didn’t look at her when he spoke. “Not a lady, no. Please hold yourself ready just after seven, Manon. Here in the kitchen. I will let my visitor in myself, and call you after I have him settled.”

“I will do exactly as you ask, Papa.” So! Perhaps Joyful was correct. Nothing in her voice or her manner gave away her excitement, but she could not keep her hands from trembling. Pray God Papa had not noticed.

Chatham Street, 4
P.M.

Gornt Blakeman moved quickly through the streets of Manhattan, the smell of the countinghouse still on him. He’d been sitting in a cubby off the main room, hearing the clink of the coins—cash money he’d promised for Devrey scrip and cash money he’d delivered—watching through a crack in the door while the certificates mounted into a higher and higher pile on the clerk’s desk. At three he’d had to order the doors closed and the purchases stopped because he was out of ready money. Virtually beggared, if the truth be told. The thought made him howl with laughter. Beggared was he? With what had come in on the
Canton Star
? Not quite. He laughed again, enjoying the looks of the curious passersby. They all knew who he was, every poxed resident of the city was talking about him this day. Sweet Jesus, but sometimes life was good.

The midday storm had greatly lessened the day’s heat; now the sun was shining and there was a cool easterly breeze. It felt good, fine in fact, and hunger was making a pleasant anticipation in his belly. Still, Blakeman paused a few steps before Eugenie Fischer’s house.

He looked across the road to the Common, dominated by the new City Hall, finished two years before. Marble on three sides only, and plain brownstone at the back. It was a plan put in place by small-minded men who could not imagine the city growing further north. But already the city extended well beyond City Hall, the population moving always deeper into the woods known as the Manhattan wilderness. These days New York City occupied the full three-mile stretch of the island’s narrow southern tip. As for what was coming…The grid laid out in 1811, before the war, showed all of Manhattan—the entire thirteen-mile length, by God!—divided by a dozen north-south avenues a hundred feet wide, and crisscrossed with a hundred fifty-five numbered streets, each sixty feet wide. The plan was for a city of uniform side-by-side lots and straight-
sided, cojoined, right-angled houses that would be cheap and easy to build. No fancy parks or sweeping vistas in the manner of European capitals. Workers were what New York City needed if she was to fulfill her destiny. Thousands of them; Christ, maybe tens of thousands. Seeing the city develop in just that fashion was one of Blakeman’s dreams. Today he’d brought it a little closer to reality.

The thought made the sap rise in him. He strode to Eugenie’s front door.

Eugenie Fisher had a table for two laid in the boudoir off her bedroom, and she served Blakeman herself from a makeshift sideboard set up in front of a fireplace not needed in summer. Because, she explained, “I thought you’d want more than the usual amount of privacy, dear Gornt.”

“Mmm, yes.” Blakeman drank the soup she gave him without much attention. He was more interested in her than in the food, however hungry he’d thought himself when he arrived.

Eugenie was aware of his brash gaze. Sometimes she stared back, but never for very long. And she never gave even the merest hint that she knew what he was thinking. Mostly, she made small talk, an amusing thing she’d read in the Federalist
Evening Post,
or the Democratic-Republican paper, the
National Advocate.
How her maid had been the first to bring Eugenie word that a ship was coming into harbor, only according to her it was a British man-o’-war coming to shell the city. Until finally, “Gornt, I can’t bear it. You’ve been here nearly twenty minutes and you still haven’t told me what happened with Bastard Devrey.”

“Exactly what I planned to happen. I like your frock.” He leaned across the table and fingered the short, puffed sleeve that bared her arm. The fabric was white and thin and felt incredibly soft to his touch. A wide blue satin ribbon caught the gown below her breasts. The dress flowed free from there to her ankles; he could see she’d adopted the latest French fashion and wasn’t corseted. He’d heard that in Europe the women adopting this mode actually damped their underchemise so it would cling closer to their bodies. Called it a blow struck for freedom. “I didn’t think you were a republican.”

“Heaven forbid.” She laughed, a tinkling little sound he found himself thinking of many times when he was not with her. “You forget, I was Eugenie LaMont before I married,” she said. “French fashion is my birthright. I adore it.”

Another part of Eugenie’s heritage was knowing when a man wanted to talk of business and politics, and when he did not. It was a skill she had honed during the four years she was married to her handsome lawyer. Dead two years Timothy Fischer was, a victim of the yellowing fever. But her wiles were all the more necessary now that she was a twenty-four-
year-old widow and must struggle every month to find the funds to keep her household afloat. “Will your ship have brought me some new silks from Canton, Gornt? If so, I will have another frock made to this same design. Will that please you?”

Blakeman nodded, his mind on other things; Eugenie stood up and took the soup plates away, then busied herself at the sideboard serving the next course. He could see the curve of her buttocks as she moved, and when she stood a certain way, the light from the window showed off the slight roundness of her belly. The fact that she was a lady, not a doxy or a whore, made her boldness wonderfully titillating. “Tell me, will every fashionable woman in the city soon adopt this style?”

Eugenie laughed. “Would you like it if they did?”

“I’m not sure there would be a lick of work done in New York if they did. No man can be expected to keep his mind on business in such circumstances.” He got up and went to where she stood and drew her to him. “Today, Eugenie. It’s been a marvelous day. Make it perfect.”

She let him pull her close, then leaned back so she could still see his face. “Tell me what happened, Gornt. I’ve been thinking about it for hours.”

His hand moved to her breast. She didn’t push it away. “Soon as I knew my ship was headed for the harbor, I went to the Tontine and confronted Bastard Devrey, just as I told you I would.” His other hand ventured to her buttocks, and when that too was allowed to remain, he began a little pattern of strokes, always exploring a bit further.

“And what did he say?” Eugenie pressed herself against his thigh.

“What could he say? He’s all but bankrupt. And as of today I own forty percent of his company. Give me your mouth.”

“Gornt, where is the money for all this coming from?”

“That’s not your concern. Kiss me, damn you.”

“They say you’re a pirate. That you—”

He managed to stop her words with a kiss, but moments later she had slipped out of his embrace. Two months and it was always the same.

Eugenie returned to the business of dinner. “Will you have some of this roasted pheasant, dearest Gornt? And perhaps a bit of boiled beef? I told cook no pies because of the heat, but if you—”

He strode to the window. “Come over here. I want to show you something.” She stood beside him. “What do you see?” he demanded.

“Ah,” she said, looking down into the street. “Two escapees from the Tammany Society next door.” She was referring to a pair of feral pigs—the city was full of them—snuffling in the gutter of the street below, and to the building on her right which housed a social club that attracted mostly mechanics and laborers, people of the class that supported the Democratic-Republicans rather than the Federalists.

Gornt chuckled. “Look across the Common.”

He meant her to ignore the now decrepit and overcrowded almshouse, she knew. And, of course, the hulk of a building still called the New Gaol, though it had been built in 1766, and the Bridewell, where prisoners with longer terms to serve were packed together like salted fish in a barrel. “The splendid City Hall,” Eugenie said. “What about it?”

“Would you like to live in it?”

“On the Common among the Irish ne’er-do-wells and thieves? You are mad, dear Gornt. A touch of the summer heat. Besides, City Hall’s not a residence.”

“But it could be made so. It could be a palace. And you could be…my Pompadour.”

Pompadour. A French king’s courtesan, never his queen. Her smile was as radiant as always and showed nothing of what she felt. “Mad indeed. But so charming with it.”

She wore her dark hair twisted in a coil at the back of her head, and between it and the scooped neck of her gown there was only bare skin. Blakeman placed one finger on her neck. “You wear no jewelry, Eugenie LaMont Fischer. Is it true then that after your husband died you were penniless and had to sell your jewels to live?”